I really need to get myself some sense of direction and I also need to stop trying to compensate the lack thereof by trying to get to places that look vaguely familiar. Pointers like "that bent looks like the one going up to the roundabout that goes to that strech of road with no speed limit" or "that font on the street sign looks like the one they use in the south-west" are in fact utterly useless. Now it's not like this is the first time I realise this, but so far I've been able to save myself with a fairly good knowledge of the public transport routes or by going underground. I don't get lost underground, it comes with being short.

Anyway, after finding out that I can't pick up my proper driver's license because it won't be finished printing before I leave, I got a provisional thing which, huzzah, is also only valid over here. I got it anyway because it means by 2 years of "don't even think about messing up or we'll take it away from you again" start now and not when I pick it up, which may well be Christmas. Then my father decided that I might as well make use of the fact that I have nothing to do at the moment (aside from packing maybe, but details!) and drive around senselessly for a bit, for practice purposes. Now you see where the orientation problems come from.

My plan was to (and you might need to look at a map of what's south-east of Berlin now) go to Beelitz, Belzig, Brandenburg and come back via Potsdam, pick something up at my mum's and go back home. What I ended up doing was failing to find the route to Beelitz from Berlin, ending up in Potsdam, getting fed up and going to my mum's, picking up stuff, finding Beelitz after all but not finding the route to Belzig, deciding that it was quite early anyway and I might as well go further. Some cities along that route I had heard of and thought they might be interesting, so I went on to Lutherstadt Wittenberge, which looked terrible, Coswig, which was even worse, couldn't find the junction I was looking for because of construction work and ended up in Dessau, which is also famous and is also terrible. When I say terrible, what I mean is that at least the outer bits of them seem to scream "we were once the pearls of communist architecture and have been neglected ever since!".

Either way, at that stage I was almost in Zerbst, which is where my grandmother was from. She was made fun of when her family moved to Berlin, because her accent was funny, so that's how far that is from civilisation. I decided not to go there and actually managed to make my way back to Potsdam without any trouble. But then. Then I realised just how big Berlin is and how many places there are that I somehow know, but have no clue where they are. My mental map of the place consists of many little islands, build around underground stations mostly, which does not help a lot. In the end, I picked up my father from work without actually having been home at all.

It all has its upsides as well though. Having the car meant that I could go over to my chosen family (ie my best friend's family, despite her not being in the country at the moment) to have dinner with them and more importantly go back without having to care about bus time tables and such. Now that was nice. Having dinner with them was also nice, we played cards and listened to music and I just felt so at home with them, despite not seeing them that often anymore. It kind of makes me think that the longer you have known someone for, the less they seem to change with time.

By the length of this post, you can probably guess that I should be doing something else. I should think about the whole packing malarkey but also figure out what's happening tonight because I'm supposed to have dinner here and apparently also spend time with my father and sister but I also promised friends that I'd come over to say good bye. I'll figure something out.